Chapter 17 Nora
NORA
Jude’s travel agent arranged for the Range Rover to be at the resort this morning.
After a breakfast which started out poorly, where we talked awkwardly about the weather and our plan for the day, and then proceeded to chow down like we hadn’t seen food in days, we headed to the front desk to grab the fob, then strode out the door with something like ten feet between us.
It wasn’t until we reached the vehicle that Jude turned in front of me. “Nora, I know stuff happened last night that’s made us all…weird, and yeah I know we need to talk about it. But for right now, can we just pretend it’s like the old days? Can we focus on Eleanor and our research?”
“And my thesis?” I asked.
“Yes. Just for now.”
I let out a breath, my shoulders relaxing for the first time this morning. “Yes,” I say. “Sounds good.”
After that, things get a lot easier.
“So this is where the love story first started,” I say as we rumble into town. I don’t even care that saying love story to Jude feels a little weird, I’m too excited to be here working on Eleanor again.
As Jude pulls up in front of the town hall, I turn on my camera and feel nothing but jittery excitement that we’re here, doing this.
Jude was always serious about going to Switzerland to follow the trail that ended in the cache by the golf course, but I never thought we’d actually do it.
After I left Quince Valley, I was certain my part in this mystery hunt was over.
But now here we are, jogging up the steps in the crisp winter sun, pushing open the door to the quaint little stone hall, where the town’s archives were stored.
The woman at the desk perks up, standing as we walk in. She looks thrilled we’re here, like her workday isn’t all that exciting. Behind her, there’s a hallway that opens up into a room where I can hear someone talking on the phone. Otherwise, it looks to be pretty quiet in here.
Can I help you?” she asks in heavily accented English.
The woman looks to be in her thirties, very tall with strong features and short, curly dark hair. I’m not sure how she knew we didn’t speak German, but I was glad not to have to use the translator I’d downloaded on my phone.
“Hi!” I say, as upbeat as possible, given I’m going to be asking for permission to spend some time in their archives.
I explain that I’m an archival student at Waldorf College in London, doing a project involving a person or persons we believe were in this town in the 1920s. “I’m really hoping we might be permitted to access your archives. We believe one of the people did quite a bit of business here.”
The woman pulls her lips into a regretful expression. “I’m so sorry, but one must make an appointment to view the items in the archives, I’m afraid.”
My chest falls.
But Jude looks over at me and winks. Of course this sends a little tickle of electricity over my skin, which I try and fail to ignore.
Jude leans on his elbows on the high desk.
This is exactly the kind of thing he lives for. “Hey,” he says, very close to the kind of tone one might say Hey, girl in.
The woman maintains her straight face, but I see the slightest tinge of pink creep up her neck.
I wish I had half the charm he does.
“Do you mind if I film?” I ask her, holding up the camera. “My thesis is all on video.”
“Well…” she says.
Jude grins. “I love being on camera, don’t you?
” He puffs out his chest and she giggles.
He tied his hair up in his sexy little man bun this morning and has his parka open to reveal his dark V-neck sweater.
Even though I can’t see it from here, I know just the way the smooth skin of his neck dips into the collar of that sweater.
I know how powerful not only his flattering words are, but also his cut jaw and gorgeous blue eyes. Especially when he lays it on thick.
And damn, he’s laying it on thick now.
“I suppose that’s fine,” she says, flattening her hair with her hands.
I shake off the jealousy like I always do and slip Jude the release forms before making myself scarce, stepping sideways to look at the photos printed on hard boards on the wall, each with captions in multiple languages, including English.
I walk along the wall, examining the photos without really seeing, as Jude launches into Eleanor’s story.
The best thing about Jude’s charm is that it’s pretty much entirely genuine.
He puts on a show that people truly enjoy.
He also fixes them with his intense gaze, making you feel like you’re the only person in the whole world.
Who doesn’t love a man as beautiful as Jude doing that?
It’s a thrill. And even though he flirts when he needs to, it’s never sleazy, and it’s not manipulative.
At least, not entirely. In fact, I’ve never once seen him do it with the aim of getting into a woman’s pants.
I’ve never seen him try to get into a woman’s pants.
In fact, last night and yesterday with me was the only time I’ve ever known him to use that powerful sexual energy for actual…sex. Kind of.
My stomach goes loose, heat riding down between my legs.
No. This is not what I’m thinking of right now.
I think of dusty books and that grumpy librarian back at home in London. That helps.
After a quick peek over my shoulder tells me Jude’s gotten her to sign the release forms I’d printed off in the business center before breakfast, I pull out my camera and begin filming.
As I alternate between capturing Jude and the staff person, Jude tells her about Eleanor.
“Her parents forced her to marry her evil husband when she was very young. He was a bad man, and a horndog, too,” Jude says.
“A horn…?”
I have to bite my cheek to keep from laughing.
“He had mistresses. Dozens of them.”
“Arschloch,” the woman says derisively.
Jude raises his eyebrows.
I don’t need to know what that means to know it’s related to George’s character.
“But her husband George had a driver, who kept a diary documenting his boss’s evildoings,” Jude says.
“We can’t find any records on this driver except for his own notes, and that he called himself JEQ.
But here’s the best part.” Jude leans in and the woman does too, totally enraptured.
“JEQ made a ton of side notes in his diary about his boss’s wife.
He called her ‘fetching’ and said…what did he say, Nor? ”
“That her ‘scoundrel of a husband’ was undeserving of her,” I say, without looking up.
The diary alluded to JEQ’s feelings toward Eleanor. But we didn’t know how far it went until we found the cache by the golf course.
Jude gave me credit for that one, seeing as I took that first diary and read it about a thousand times.
I knew we were missing something. Then one day Jude and I were watching the old movie Shakespeare in Love.
Or rather, I was, while Jude was half asleep.
Listening to the way they spoke and remembering how when reading Shakespeare in college I’d learned to decipher each line for its meaning, I woke up the next morning with an epiphany.
“The product of the trees o’er the woods by the game” wasn’t just a poetic turn of phrase JEQ had used.
As it turned out, JEQ had hidden a second diary.
The diary, we discovered after combing the trees by the golf course, was a stack of papers we found in a metal box hidden in the woods edging the Rolling Hills resort’s golf course.
“That diary was a two-hundred-page story of unrequited love,” Jude says.
The woman’s practically swooning, her fists curled under her chin.
She gets me.
Jude is obsessed with this story because he wants to prove that Eleanor’s husband murdered her after finding out about her affair. I also wanted to get these answers. But mostly, I’m obsessed with JEQ’s love story. Those papers tell a tale of an unrequited love that went on for years.
I can relate.
“And that’s where the trail runs cold,” Jude says, sighing.
The papers, just like my life when I left Jude for London, ended in a cliffhanger: JEQ noted that all three of them would be traveling to Switzerland for a year, where George planned on dumping Eleanor in a remote cottage he owned in the Alps.
“The last note in the diary is that JEQ said George told him his job would be to ‘mind’ Eleanor, by checking in on her every so often over the course of the year,” Jude explains. “We think that’s where the affair started.”
“Here!” the woman says.
“Yes,” I tell her, zooming in.
“So,” Jude concludes, “we know this is the town George Cleary did a ton of his business deals in during the first world war, so we were hoping—”
“Wait, stop,” the woman says. “Cleary?”
“Yeah,” Jude says, standing up straight. “You heard of him?”
The woman opens the pony-door beside the front counter and comes out, striding briskly past us to the photos I was looking at when we first walked in.
“George Cleary,” she says, pointing to an old black and white photo.
We join her, and I aim the camera at the photo, slowly zooming in.
The photograph is of a portly man with a thick black mustache and long black coat lined with glossy metal-looking buttons.
He’s standing with his foot on a shovel in front of a slew of other men, some with their feet perched on rocks, stumps, and one, a wagon, all posing for the camera.
Behind them mountains stretch into a clear sky.
“American businessman G. W. Cleary,” Jude reads from the English portion of the plaque, “breaking ground on what would later be Brehmsbruck’s official town hall.”
A thrill runs through me as I look up from the camera, meeting Jude’s eye.
“He built the building we’re standing in,” I say, unable to keep the excitement from my voice.
“He is in many documents and photographs,” the woman says, sounding as excited as us.
I look up from the camera at Jude. He grins widely, again setting that flutter off in my stomach. My brain chooses that moment to show me an image of his face, at the side of my tub, his hands gripping the edge as he watches me…